Friday, 26 September 2014

Its been a while...

Its been a while since I have shared what's been going on at The Little Paper House Press in a lot more detail. I'm afraid I have surrendered to the world of Instagram with a passion, as many others have, and now share most of our news via our Instagram profile. That's not to say this is the end of this blog. I do plan to keep this channel to air, just not as frequently that's all.

Since the last blog entry back in March, and with the arrival of our much larger printing press things have not been the same. I think it would be fair to say that the entire way in which we work has changed.

The first thing that changed was the workshop. It was in need of proper lighting, ventilation and protection from the elements, so with that said I left the 'renovating' side of things to the men in my life and I headed straight to Bower Bird in search of windows. Bower Bird is a great not-for-profit reuse and repair centre in Marrickville. Their mission is to rescue, repair, reuse and resell all kinds of furniture and appliances to reduce hard waste going to landfill. Here you can either donate unwanted items or purchase a huge range of items at low prices. It really is an amazing place with honourable values at its core. This is where I found my beautiful cedar windows for $20 each.

The next thing was lighting. A few years ago I found an old, large, dome shaped light, with a beautiful textured glass sitting in the basement of my parents new home. I had put it in storage until I knew where to hang it. Well that day had come, so I hauled it home, removed the old flaking paint, brought a chain to hang it, painted it with black enamel paint, and put in a new globe. When I turned it on, it was perfect!

While the renovating continued, I cleaned the press. It had come with a lot of black grease, dust, and grime, but under all that was a green coloured press in need of a couple of minor repairs and lots of oil. I unclogged the holes for oiling with a drill bit, which did the trick perfectly. I used gumption, steel wool scourers and elbow grease to remove most of the grit. After so much scrubbing I became quite fond of its green colour and decided not to repaint it, and now actually quite love my press just the way it is. I plan to get six new spring for the rollers, as some have lost a couple of coils. The gripper bars are missing, as are the mechanics that connect the gripper bars to the press, although we have printed greeting cards, business cards, party invitations, notebooks, and a booklet cover without the gripper bars, and have not missed them. For now its all good but it is something that I plan to repair in the not to distant future.

We have been using our new press for six months now and are very happy to be printing in one quarter of the time it use to take. We also have much better ink coverage, impression and versatility to our work. With a much larger press came so many more possibilities. Its hard to believe how long, and how much work we produced on our little Adana table top. We certainly did the hard yards, and only now, with this much bigger printing press, are we fully aware just how much we learnt and how much we will continue to learn.

It has been a whirlwind of leaps and bounds over the last few months but an incredibly fulfilling, exciting and rewarding chapter in the ongoing story that is The Little Paper House Press :)

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The Little Paper House Press is a letterpress workshop. Here we design and print greeting cards on an old, manual (no wires, electricity or motors here) printing press. Our work horse may be old, but our methods are new age. Hope you enjoy your stay :0)